The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Collaborative document creation, editing and management among distributed teams of workers continues to present challenges for efficient implementation in distributed computer systems and application programs. The problem has become more complex recently because more workers need to assemble a larger variety of data resources of different types to complete projects. For example, advancing a project could require marshaling electronic documents, images, spreadsheets, videos, source code files, database records, issue tracking records, chat conversations, transcripts of meetings conducted via video or online, and so forth. However, each of these data items may be stored in a different storage location and/or managed by a different application. Use of multiple different applications could be required merely to retrieve and view different data items.
Furthermore, when workers are organized into teams, a first team member may be unaware that a second team member digitally owns or controls other data items that the first team member may find useful or necessary for the project. Or, if the first team member is generally aware that the second team member has relevant data items, the first team member may not know how to obtain access to those data items or may lack necessary permissions. Similarly, there may be other individuals in an enterprise who are not part of the team of the first team member, and/or unknown to the first team member, who have relevant data items.
Additionally, digital items may be shared among users. For example, one user may send a digital item to another user. That digital item may be, for example, a roster of people working on a project together. After sending the document, the first user may alter the team roster. In order to keep the second user up-to-date on the team roster, the user would have to continue to resend that document to the second user each time the document is altered. Only then would the second user have access to all of the alterations. Further, if the second user alters the team roster, then the second user would have to send it back to the first user. Such a system of sending digital items back and forth as they are altered can cause issues with synchronization, and inconsistencies in digital items shared among users.